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Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down.

A reasonable rule is that once you begin making an argument ad Hitlerum—comparing some malevolent politician to Hitler or some malignant movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but non-eliminationist) war a genocide comparable to the Holocaust—you have lost the plot. The facile but extreme analogy is the first resort of the unimaginative alarmist.

Vandals have done some senseless stuff on Bay Area Rapid Transit. They have removed the fire extinguishers from the station walls and sprayed them all over the place, for example. But what particularly vexed Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the train system that connects San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, was their destruction of map display cases at stations across the system: “You could not see the maps for years.”
Now you can.

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The day that Donald Trump swore his second oath of office, he signed an executive order demanding “accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people.

People like to say that American culture has a puritanical streak: one that entails, among other things, a certain haughty piousness, instilled by the killjoys who reached New England’s shores in the 17th century. Yet the Pew Research Center, in a pair of reports released last month, asked participants in various countries about a host of moral issues—and found few in the United States that were widely condemned.